The Age of Innocence 纯真年代

She had grown tired of what people called "society"; New York was kind, it was almost oppressively hospitable; she should never forget the way in which it had welcomed her back; but after the first flush of novelty she had found herself, as she phrased it, too "different" to care for the things it cared about--and so she had decided to try Washington, where one was supposed to meet more varieties of people and of opinion. And on the whole she should probably settle down in Washington, and make a home there for poor Medora, who had worn out the patience of all her other relations just at the time when she most needed looking after and protecting from matrimonial perils.

"But Dr. Carver--aren't you afraid of Dr. Carver? I hear he's been staying with you at the Blenkers'."

“可是卡弗博士——你不是担心他吧？我听说，他一直和你们一起在布兰克家。”

She smiled. "Oh, the Carver danger is over. Dr. Carver is a very clever man. He wants a rich wife to finance his plans, and Medora is simply a good advertisement as a convert."

她莞尔一笑。“咳，卡弗危机已经过去了。卡弗博士人很聪明，他想要一个有钱的妻子为他的计划提供资金。作为一名皈依者，梅多拉只是个好广告。”

"A convert to what?"

“皈依什么？”

"To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes. But, do you know, they interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition--somebody else's tradition--that I see among our own friends. It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country." She smiled across the table. "Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?"

"I haven't seen him for a long time. But I used to; and he understands."

“我很久没见他了，但过去常对他讲，他能理解。”

"Ah, it's what I've always told you; you don't like us. And you like Beaufort because he's so unlike us." He looked about the bare room and out at the bare beach and the row of stark white village houses strung along the shore. "We're damnably dull. We've no character, no colour, no variety.--I wonder," he broke out, "why you don't go back?"

It was impossible to make the confession more dispassionately, or in a tone less encouraging to the vanity of the person addressed. Archer reddened to the temples, but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock about it if it were left undisturbed.

"At least," she continued, "it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don't know how to explain myself"--she drew together her troubled brows-- "but it seems as if I'd never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid."

“高雅的乐趣——是值得追求的啊！”他想这样顶她一句，但她恳求的目光使他沉默了。

"Exquisite pleasures--it's something to have had them!" he felt like retorting; but the appeal in her eyes kept him silent.

她接着说：“我想非常诚实地对待你——和我自己。很久以来，我就盼望有这样一次机会，能告诉你，你怎样帮助了我，你怎样改变了我——”

"I want," she went on, "to be perfectly honest with you--and with myself. For a long time I've hoped this chance would come: that I might tell you how you've helped me, what you've made of me--"

阿切尔坐在那儿，紧锁眉头，睁大了眼睛。他笑了一声打断了她的话。“可你知道你如何改变了我吗？”

Archer sat staring beneath frowning brows. He interrupted her with a laugh. "And what do you make out that you've made of me?"

她脸色有些苍白地问：“改变了你？”

She paled a little. "Of you?"

“对，你改变我的东西远比我改变你的要多。我娶了一个女人是因为另一个女人要我这么做。”

"Yes: for I'm of your making much more than you ever were of mine. I'm the man who married one woman because another one told him to."

她苍白的脸色顿时红了。“我以为——你答应过——今天不讲这些事。”

Her paleness turned to a fugitive flush. "I thought-- you promised--you were not to say such things today."

“啊——真是个十足的女人啊！你们这些女人谁都不肯把一件糟糕的事解决好！”

"Ah--how like a woman! None of you will ever see a bad business through!"

她压低声音说：“那是糟糕的事吗——对梅来说？”

She lowered her voice. "IS it a bad business--for May?"

他站在窗口，敲打着拉起的吊窗框，每根神经都感受到她提起表妹的名字时那种眷恋之情。

He stood in the window, drumming against the raised sash, and feeling in every fibre the wistful tenderness with which she had spoken her cousin's name.

"Or if not," she continued, pursuing her own thought with a painful application, "if it's not worth while to have given up, to have missed things, so that others may be saved from disillusionment and misery--then everything I came home for, everything that made my other life seem by contrast so bare and so poor because no one there took account of them--all these things are a sham or a dream--"

他原地转过身来。“如果是这样，那你就更没有理由不回去了？”他替她下结论说。

He turned around without moving from his place. "And in that case there's no reason on earth why you shouldn't go back?" he concluded for her.

"Not if you staked your all on the success of my marriage. My marriage," he said savagely, "isn't going to be a sight to keep you here." She made no answer, and he went on: "What's the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring--that's all."

Her arms had dropped along the table, and she sat with her face abandoned to his gaze as if in the recklessness of a desperate peril. The face exposed her as much as if it had been her whole person, with the soul behind it: Archer stood dumb, overwhelmed by what it suddenly told him.

“你也——啊，这些日子，你也在忍受吗？”

"You too--oh, all this time, you too?"

作为回答，她让噙着的泪珠溢出眼睑，缓缓流淌下来。

For answer, she let the tears on her lids overflow and run slowly downward.

Half the width of the room was still between them, and neither made any show of moving. Archer was conscious of a curious indifference to her bodily presence: he would hardly have been aware of it if one of the hands she had flung out on the table had not drawn his gaze as on the occasion when, in the little Twenty- third Street house, he had kept his eye on it in order not to look at her face. Now his imagination spun about the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still he made no effort to draw nearer. He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied. His one terror was to do anything which might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought, that he should never again feel quite alone.

但过了一会儿，一种荒废时光的感觉又控制了他。在这儿，他们就在这儿，靠得很近，安全而又隐蔽；然而他们却被各自的命运所束缚，仿佛隔着半个世界。

But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart.

“这还有什么意义呢——既然你准备回去？”他突然喊道。他的言外之意是绝望地向她乞求：我究竟怎样才能留住你？

"What's the use--when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopeless HOW ON EARTH CAN I KEEP YOU? crying out to her beneath his words.

她坐着纹丝不动，眼睑低垂。“哦——我现在还不会走嘛！”

She sat motionless, with lowered lids. "Oh--I shan't go yet!"

“还不会？那么，到某一时间就走？你已经预定了时间？”

"Not yet? Some time, then? Some time that you already foresee?"

听到这儿，她抬起一双清澈的眼睛说：“我答应你：只要你坚持住，只要我们能像现在这样正视对方，我就不走。”

At that she raised her clearest eyes. "I promise you: not as long as you hold out. Not as long as we can look straight at each other like this."

He dropped into his chair. What her answer really said was: "If you lift a finger you'll drive me back: back to all the abominations you know of, and all the temptations you half guess." He understood it as clearly as if she had uttered the words, and the thought kept him anchored to his side of the table in a kind of moved and sacred submission.

At that he sprang up, forgetting everything but the sweetness of her face. She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only to wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted not as a check but as a guide to him. They fell into his, while her arms, extended but not rigid, kept him far enough off to let her surrendered face say the rest.

They may have stood in that way for a long time, or only for a few moments; but it was long enough for her silence to communicate all she had to say, and for him to feel that only one thing mattered. He must do nothing to make this meeting their last; he must leave their future in her care, asking only that she should keep fast hold of it.

“不要——不要不高兴，”她说，声音有点嘶哑，同时把手抽了回去；他答道：“你不回去了——你是不回去了？”仿佛那是他惟一无法忍受的事情。

"Don't--don't be unhappy," she said, with a break in her voice, as she drew her hands away; and he answered: "You won't go back--you won't go back?" as if it were the one possibility he could not bear.

“我不回去了，”她说罢，转身打开门，率先朝公共餐厅走去。

"I won't go back," she said; and turning away she opened the door and led the way into the public dining-room.

The strident school-teachers were gathering up their possessions preparatory to a straggling flight to the wharf; across the beach lay the white steam-boat at the pier; and over the sunlit waters Boston loomed in a line of haze.